Unequal lives

The Lives of Others; Neel Mukherjee random house); Price: Rs.425; 528pp Though bested against all expectations by Richard Flanagan in the final round of assessment for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize 2014, Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others made literary headlines as the front-runner until the last mile. In recent years, the retelling of (as in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland) the turbulent history of West Bengal in the 1960s has become a genre for recalling youthful intellectual idealism and mounting a critique of impotent communist activism. The history of the Ghosh joint family, residing in Bhawanipore, an upper middle-class borough of Calcutta, unfolds in slow, complacent mode, with three generations living, interacting, quarrelling and sparring in their sprawling four-storey mansion. Presided over by the patriarch Prafullanath and matriarch Charubala, the cast of meticulously drawn characters enacting the everyday drama of petty rivalries and envy, love and hatred, pride and hypocrisy include sons Adinath, Priyonath, Bholanath, their families, the youngest Somnath’s widow and children, and their only sister Chhaya, a cross-eyed spinster. The flourishing family business, Charu Paper and Sons Pvt. Ltd is in the doldrums, plagued by frequent labour troubles endangering the family fortune. Yet form has to be maintained with a retinue of servants, ritual observances, social customs, and religious traditions to sustain a sense of continuity and security. But the sudden disappearance of Adinath’s eldest son, 21-year-old Supratik who flees this bastion of middle-class morality and feudalism to “find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given to me and make my own”, is a rude jolt to a family reluctant to come to terms with a changing world and its declining fortunes. Supratik is sensitive to class discrimination and the differential treatment meted out to family retainers and his widowed aunt Purba and her children. Alienated, he moves out of the city to work with “landless peasants, the sharecroppers, wage-labourers and impoverished tenants… to organise them into armed struggle”. The adversarial relationship between the establishment and people at the grassroots, the widening chasm between town and country, is the larger national socio-economic history that Mukherjee narrates in the novel. Therefore the recurring domestic crises of a typically Bengali bhadra family pale in comparison with “something that was going to explode like a thousand suns in an unsuspecting sky — Naxalbari”. This dramatic tension is sustained through a narrative style which criss-crosses the boundaries of past and present, and moves in alternate chapters from the family home with a prestigious Calcutta address, to unspecified marginal locations where the revolution is enacted. The technique of parallel narratives and corresponding voices (the family saga using impersonal narration, and Supratik’s letters a confessional tone) highlights the unseen linkages between the characters and events. In trying to ascertain the whereabouts of her son, Sandhya pieces together newspaper reports about violence in Naxalbari, peasant uprisings in different parts of India, and the iconic revolutionary Charu Mazumdar’s declaration that “hundreds of Naxalbaris are smouldering…